Wednesday, December 2, 2015

The Human Café: Chapter 2

2. how we hate the
rain

The world was
practically caged in gloom. It hung outside like curtains so thick and dreary
that it was hard to lift even my own spirits, let alone Lana’s. Caesar, as
ever, was himself. It took more than meteorological dysfunctions to change
that. Some new video game had captivated his attention so thoroughly that he
had not even touched his food.

Outside, the
downpour had puddled on the asphalt like little black mirrors reflecting the
sky, oceans with their own raging tides. How terrifying it would be, I thought,
to be a sailor on that sea, with drops the size of houses hammering down. To
ants, perhaps, on a boat made of leaf, this might seem like the end of the
world.

But then again,
ants had survived enough of these storms that I’m sure they were no longer
fazed. They were, after all, the inventors of the storm cellar. I wondered, for
a moment, whether theirs flooded or not.

“I hate the rain,”
Lana muttered.

The warmth of the
café had fogged up the windows. I watched the blinking of the blurry
traffic-lights beyond them, and the way they reflected on the beaded moisture
before I reached over and drew a smiley face on the glass beside Lana. She hadn’t
looked up from her drawing in quite some time, but she gave me a brief glance.
The light was casting streak-marks over her face; they looked like tears.

Personally, I
didn’t mind the rain so much. It was comfortable—warm and flannel. It made that
itch in my mind grow even if it chased off all the pictures in the process. It
slowed everything down.

But she had never
liked it—at least not in the times that I had known her. It changed her, I
thought. It was as though, when the rain began, all the best parts of her
retreated. She saved those parts only for the sunshine.

Gradually, I think
some of her dislike had rubbed off on us, in the nature of being changed by the
people you love. Caesar and I had no reason to be anything but ourselves—but
she did. And that, I supposed, is how we came to hate the rain.

I turned my
attention back to the black-skinned notebook in front of me; it seemed nearly
as dismal as the day itself. I skimmed over the last story I’d written, but
felt no lurch of color or excitement in its words as I had when I’d first
conjured them.

Atlantis was
waiting. I needed to go back. I needed to speak to the stranger and the Queen.
But I didn’t. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that I even knew what was
supposed to come next. I flipped to the next page and studied the blankness for
a moment.

“What are you
playing?” I asked Caesar, and this may as well have been a verbal abandon of
all hope of productivity. Lana identified it as such.

“It’s a new one,”
he said, his eyes glued open and staring. “It just came out yesterday. It’s
called Titan’s-Blood: Vengeance.”

“Oh,” Lana
muttered, looking up fully for the first time, “Let me guess: Fueled by a
cliché tragic backstory, an invincible hero must undergo a series of identical
trials before finally facing an underdeveloped villain with just enough
unanswered questions to sell the next game.” She blinked at him. “Anything like
that?”

He raised his
eyebrows and nodded, a tight smile flattening his mouth. “They must have sent
you the demo packet,” he said.

“No,” she replied
gruffly. “I just suffered through listening to your commentary on Titan’s-Blood:
Alliance and what was it? Titan’s-Blood: Awakening?”

“Don’t forget Titan’s-Blood:
Doomsday,” I added.

“Oh yes,” she
chirped, “let’s not forget Doomsday.”

He chuckled dryly,
setting down the game momentarily to scoop a substantial amount of ice-cream
sundae into his mouth.

If the rain had any
effect on me, it was to make me quieter; if it had any effect on Caesar, it was
to increase his already substantial desire for sugar. “Vengeance is
totally different,” he said.

“Oh?” Lana
challenged. “What’s the difference?”

“The graphics are
better,” he said, happily. “And the blood is a lot more realistic.”

“Yay,” she said.
The rolling of her eyes seeped into the language of her shoulders. “Realistic
blood.”

“Not to mention you
can skip the tutorials and all the boring narration,” he added.

Lana mustered all
the sarcasm I thought one person could hold. “Oh yes, let’s skip the only part
of the whole game that could have any substance.”

“Well you have to
admit,” I chimed in, “that way he’s technically spending less time on
it.”

She scowled at
him—and me, by extension—but had no other words to add. So she looked back down
and blocked the notebook with her arm.

My smiley face had
mostly melted back into fog so I drew him again. This time I gave him eyebrows
but thought they made him look somewhat psychotic immediately afterwards. An
angry clown.

“Are you going to
go back to Atlantis?” Lana asked, after a few minutes.

“I probably should,”
I muttered. My arms felt like the pillars that held up my head, which seemed
heavy and empty at the same time. Filled with cement, and hardened by rain.

All of our
collective homework sat in the backpacks under our table. But none of us had
even looked at them, yet. For a moment, I considered breaking protocol and
pulling it out. It was bound to happen, sooner or later. It might just be
easier.

Caesar saved me
from considering it further. “You should write the werewolf one,” he said.

Lana reached under
the table, pulled out Caesar’s backpack, and slapped the little copy of Henry
V down on the table. “Read,” she said.

“But mom,”
he whined. She took his ice-cream sundae and stuck it on the windowsill. He
scowled and set down his phone to reach for it. She grabbed the phone off the
table, and promptly sat on it. “Ew!” he barked. “You’re gonna break it!”

“Read,” she
commanded.

His frown was a
pouting child’s. It was too dreary to laugh, but I offered my most entertained
smile. Lana returned to drawing. I returned to pen-clicking.

I didn’t have to
wait long to feel her hand, under the table, passing the phone to me as
sneakily as she could. The pencil didn’t stop moving for a moment in her other
hand. Not for the first time did I reconsider Caesar’s assertion that she was a
classically trained ninja.

Lana pointed her
pencil-tip at him. “If you say one word about werewolves, so help me—”

“I wasn’t going
to,” he jabbed back, meeting her eyes. “I was going to say that you could write
about a poor little boy who has his only toy stolen by an angry old woman who
wants to take away his ice-cream and eat his soul—”

I kicked him under
the table and he hid his face behind the book. “Sorry ma’am,” he said. Lana
leaned back into her drawing. I could see frustration in her shoulders, the way
she hunched over the paper. But she was not really angry; not yet, anyway.
Caesar would not push his luck, today—but he couldn’t keep his stiff face for
more than a few seconds. He soon uttered a malcontented sigh and waved the book
around somewhat disdainfully. “Seriously though, have either of you even read
this book?” He asked.

Lana and I looked
at one another, and I raised my eyebrows. “Once more unto the breach, my
friends, once more—Or close the wall up with our English dead.”

“There is some
soul of goodness in things evil,” quoted Lana, “would men observingly
distill it out.”

Caesar scowled.
“There’s something wrong with you two.”

“Oh come on,” I
chuckled. “Or close the wall up with our English dead? Even you could
get into that. It’s like the Shakespearian version of the Three-Hundred
Spartans.”

“Thank heaven
Shakespeare didn’t write about the Spartans,” Lana teased, “or Caesar would
have to reject the whole thing out of principal.”

Caesar pointed at
me, suddenly looking curious. “Have you ever wondered if somewhere in the
ancient East, people told stories about the One-Million-Persians instead?”

I laughed but
shrugged. I drew the smiley face again, leaving off the eyebrows this time, and
looked back out at the gray sky. In a few moment’s time, everything had reset.
Lana to her notebook, Caesar scowling to his Shakespeare. I was left with the
empty page and a swelling dissatisfaction with its blankness.

Each of those
little teardrops had a story, I thought; albeit the same story. The same birth,
the same growth. They fell the same way, I supposed. They even fell at the same
speed (thanks to a man in a leaning tower, a few hundred years ago). Gravity
was their version of time, pulling us forward, dragging them down.

But they still had
their differences. Some of them fell straight onto the street. Some of them hit
rooftops first. Some hit dirt, and the grass swallowed them up. Some fell on
cars and got to see the roaring in their bellies up close for a moment or two.
Others got struck by lightning before they even had a chance to touch down,
vaporized (or polarized).

Some of them
collected and built rivers, trickling down the gutters, launching little
cigarette-butt canoes and leafy warships. Drowning ants. Or maybe the ants knew
how to swim, by now. Maybe they were manning the little boats, shoving off in frigates
and men-of-war, breaking tiny little bottles of champagne and cheering, off to
discover new lands.

The sky kept firing
on them, and the ants, I guess, had no way to return fire. Their only means of
defiance was survival.

Dragonflies hummed
by. The rain didn’t bother them. They were born underwater.

For some reason,
worms crawled onto the street to die. Sacrifices to appease whatever angry
worm-gods were sending the destruction. I imagined their slimy pink councils
meeting somewhere to discuss which members of society to offer up. Perhaps the
old; perhaps the young. Little worm-virgins, for the dragons (or volcanoes) of
the sky. They were drinking themselves to death. (And they were getting run
over by cars.)

There was no story
in my head, though there was one all around me. But there were plenty of words.
They were desperate, yearning words, but everything was calm inside of the café
and inside me, quiet despite the sort of static in the air.

I didn’t resort to
poetry often, because it was always hard to force; but when it came, I didn’t
stop it. I set the pen down, and stammered out the few lines that I could:

letters in bottles

Like rain, we all
are born the same.

To fall, and
land—and there remain.

We pool, and
splash; and for a while,

Forget we fell in
single file.

Like bottles full
of desperate words,

We bob along, until
we’re heard.

Like ants upon this
earthly skin;

Breathe out. And
then breathe in again.

Once more unto this
breach, my friends

‘Twixt earth and
sky, ‘twixt start and end.

Once more unto the
break of day,

Where all shall
soon be wash’d away.

(So mount your
cigarette canoe.

I’m just an ant. But so are you.)

Enjoy what you've read? Check back soon for Chapter 3! If you are interested in reading the book in its entirety, please consider helping me out by pledging a gift on my Kickstarter page to help me get it printed, and receive a copy as soon as it's ready!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Click to Check Out my Kickstarter Page!

About Me

My name is Jeff. I am a writer of words, and a servant of King Jesus. Lover of good books, great coffee, dear friends and sunshine, living in a world forged by words, in a land spun from golden summers and grey winters. I see things differently, and I write what I see.